Honestly, the shotgun has always been my favorite weapon in any Doom game. Now I played Doom 3 on the regular XBox which I'm pretty sure had a more functional shotgun than this version. My issue isn't so much the spread, which can be ridiculous on account of a point blank shot at a corpse on the floor had EVERY bullet miss.

My main issue is actually that YOUR shotgun is so slow to re-fire. The enemies pop shells atleast twice as fast as you, which is HORRENDOUS for balancing the shotgun combat.

Don't trade shotgun fire with soldier enemies in the open. Grenades or the machine gun are the way to go. If you're going to use the shotgun either pop out from cover or get back around a corner and hit them with a full blast when they follow. The shotgun is better against melee or enemies with dodgable attacks. It's the same as the vanilla Doom 3 shotgun. You're probably thinking of the Doom 1/2 shotgun, which was a killing machine.

I suppose I am still thinking about it Doom 1/2 style, but it seems odd that they would take such a great omni-weapon and make it that much worse, I mean I can understand the spread to encourage close combat usage, but the fire-rate could really use a touch-up, especially if I've sacrificed safe firing distance to get close with it.

In Doom 1 and 2, the shotgun was more of a deathray. You could take something down with a couple shots halfway across the map. If you can use the word realism in a game about fighting a demonic invasion on Mars, in my opinion I feel the shotgun is pretty good. I use it on zombies and for close work, and on the flying skull dudes. Real world, they are more of a weapon used for small game than tactical.

It's the best weapon in the game. Nowhere near as useful as the old Doom shotgun, but in Doom 3 it's the weapon I pretty much always had equipped. Not great for every enemy, but it does the job for most of the game.

It's my default weapon too, if I need to hose something down, full auto is just a nudge of the mouse wheel away. I really liked the double barrel in the Lost Missions, kind of neat the way they justified an old school weapon in a futuristic setting. I don't worry too much about that sort of thing in games/movies anyway, if I want realism I stop using electricity and play a few levels of Real Life {currently in Beta}